It is not the intention of this book to furnish a fully rounded statement of Buddhism, and so I am at liberty here to confine myself to what is necessary for our immediate purpose. To attempt to deal in detail with all the many mistakes that have here been made by western expositors would require a whole book to itself. The Causal Chain consists of twelve links, on which account it is also alluded to under the name of the “Twelve Nidānas.” The twelve links of the chain are: 1. Ignorance (Avijjā); 2. Predispositions, Tendencies (Sankhāra); 3. Consciousness (Viññāṇa); 4. Individuality (Nāma-rūpa); 5. The seat of sense; 6. Contact; 7. Sensation; 8. Thirst of life (Taṇhā); 9. Clinging (Upādāna); 10. Becoming (Bhava); 11. Birth (Jāti); 12. A Complex consisting of the essential ingredients of all existence--namely, old age, death, misery, lamentation, sorrow, grief, and despair. This “Chain” is translated by the great majority of occidental expositors of Buddhism thus: “Out of Ignorance arise the Predispositions. Out of the Predispositions arises Consciousness,” and so forth. Such a translation is at one and the same time incorrect as regards the wording and misleading as regards the meaning. For here the separate links of the chain are placed with regard to each other in the relationship of cause and effect, in the purely physical sense in which the two represent a following after one another. But in order to have a pure following after one another of cause and effect, there are needed artificial preconditions such as physics puts for herself when she works with “bodies,”--that is, with fixed magnitudes complete in themselves. Actuality, however, knows nothing of any such things. Actuality knows only processes which at every moment of their existence represent a new biological value. Only where “bodies” in this purely physical sense are presumed to exist, can one speak of a following after one another of cause and effect;--a mode of representing matters that is ridiculed by men of insight among physicists themselves. E. Mach, for example, makes fun of it in the humorous phrase: “Upon a dose of cause there follows a dose of effect”; whereby, to be sure, himself, and with him the whole of modern positivism whose mouthpiece he is,[13] falls into the opposite extreme, inasmuch as he seeks to substitute for the conception of causality of scholasticism--the following after one another of cause and effect--dependence outside of time, as represented by the concept of mathematical function. In sooth, one position is as far removed from actuality as the other. Every causal relation existing in actuality runs its course on the lines--to take an example--of seed and tree, where the causal relation is neither a pure, unmixed following after one another, nor yet a lying alongside one another outside of time, but a combination of following after and lying alongside one another.